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Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

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Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#161

Post by paxys »

refurb wrote: post #111

I always find discussion of the world biggest city a bit of a pointless exercise considering it’s entirely dependent on how administrative lines are drawn. Highly fragmented metro areas are regarded as smaller than consolidated metro areas, whereas they might be the same size overall.

These rankings always consider city to be a contiguous metro area, regardless of how internal lines are drawn. Otherwise most of them wouldn't show up on the list at all. "Los Angeles" for example has close to 200 indiviudal cities.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#162

Post by mcmoor »

ghaff wrote: post #11
skx001 wrote: post #4

Alternative Link: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/jakarta-world-s-most-p... Key Facts: Number of megacities, urban areas with 10 million or more inhabitants has quadrupled from 8 in 1975 to 33 in 2025. Jakarta is now the world’s most populous city, with nearly 42 million residents. The current population of Indonesia is 286 million. In 2019, Indonesia said it will be moving its capital to Nusantara, a new city…

I also imagine a lot of people who are admiring these megacities have never been to one. Jakarta has oceans of scooters and, when I was there to visit some customers with our country manager, she had a driver. With some exceptions like Singapore, SE Asian cities are horrible to get around.

Everytime I see the ocean of scooters, I wonder how horrible it'd be if scooters weren't invented but instead everyone use cars like in America. Either it'll make the most legendary traffic jam ever or GDP will be cut in half since no one can move anywhere. With our already overcrowded public transport, it's practically the only alternative.

I actually wonder how much better American traffic would be if scooters are more popular.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#163

Post by Loughla »

duffyjp wrote: post #32
decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time. The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a…

>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.

I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though.

I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#164

Post by [deleted] »

Froztnova wrote: post #46
cdmckay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which assumptions are those?

Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate. I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got aroun…

[deleted]

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#165

Post by paxys »

decimalenough wrote: post #17

I used to spend a lot of time in Jakarta for work, and it's an underrated city. Yes, it's hot, congested, polluted and largely poor, but so is Bangkok. Public transport remains not great, but it's improved a lot with the airport link, the metro, LRT, Transjakarta BRT. SE Asia's only legit high speed train now connects to Bandung in minutes. Grab/Gojek (Uber equivalents) make getting around cheap and bypass the langua…

So - hot, congested, polluted, no public transit, cheap taxis, cheap luxury hotels, amazing food, fun night activities (but you'll need to know locals). Other than the no crime claim (which I find dubious) you've just described every big city in every developing country on the planet.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#166

Post by eaksa »

rafram wrote: post #83
itake wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as Vietnam: No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization.

Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.

Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#167

Post by vladgur »

esperent wrote: post #159
vladgur wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be a general issue with SE Asia, but one thing that was a breath of fresh air for me as I departed Jakarta from my Bali trip last year was a thought that I no longer need to worry about quality of water being used to wash salad veggies or clean my toothbrush with. Clean safe water from the sink was definitely not something I experienced in Bali in 2024 and I had the similar impression in Jakart

Clean safe water from the sink is not something you'll find in most of the world, in fact. It's not just SEA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Safe_drink_tap_water_map.... So basically it's only safe to drink tap water in western countries + Japan, Singapore, Chile, South Korea, and a few of the rich Arab countries. I would argue that even the blue areas here would be speckled with lots of non-drinkable areas if yo…

Any idea why that is? Why is safety of tap water high(I hope) priority in some parts of the world and not the others?

Is it simply the economics of water purification and delivery or something else?

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#168

Post by Nition »

paxys wrote: post #156
nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rain, noise, traffic... welcome to SEA

Man if you think Seattle has too much noise and traffic you should stay away from basically every other mid-large sized city anywhere in the world.

I presume they mean South East Asia.

Re: Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world

#170

Post by mcmoor »

awongh wrote: post #90
superconduct123 wrote: post #13

I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media

I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam. Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east /…

At least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.
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